by K C Ames
She couldn’t help but think no matter their legal squabbles, Roy was family. And even though the Kirkpatrick family was very dysfunctional, so were a lot of other families, and Roy was still her blood and now he was dead. And he died with them fighting over land.
She felt even worse that their last words and looks exchanged the previous day had been so acrimonious.
Benny and Courtney left her alone for a few minutes to process the news.
“I’m sorry,” Benny said, walking up to her slowly. Courtney walked up and hugged Dana tightly.
“What happened?” Dana finally asked.
“He was murdered,” Benny said.
“Murdered? How can that be?”
“Details are still up in the air,” Benny said.
“When did this happen?” Dana asked.
“I was told that he was killed late last night, and they found his body about an hour ago,” Benny replied.
“Oh, sheesh,” Dana said, covering her mouth with her trembling hand. “A robbery gone bad?” she asked after a moment of silence.
“I know nothing about that yet,” Benny said.
“So what happens now?”
“There is no police presence in Mariposa Beach, it’s too small of a town. The closest police substation is in Playa Guiones, so they’ll send a policeman to the scene from there. It’s about a twenty-minute drive, so I’m sure he’s here by now,” Benny explained.
“The police force is different here than in the States,” Benny said. “Unlike the city police departments in the States, towns don’t have their own police force. We have a National Police Force. The cops enforce the law nationally from stations and substations all over the country. But the police do not investigate crimes. They can’t even charge anyone with a crime. That falls under the auspices of the Organismo de Investigación Judicial, OIJ, the Judicial Investigation Department, which is a unit of the Supreme Court of Justice of Costa Rica. The Judicial Police has jurisdiction in the entire country and its detectives are the only ones who can actually investigate a crime and charge individuals with crimes, not the national police force. The OIJ detectives are sort of like a San Francisco Police detective and an FBI agent, rolled into one.”
“So the cop coming from Guiones, he won’t start investigating?” Dana asked.
“No. Their role is to come here to secure the scene and make sure no one messes with it while they wait for the OIJ to send detectives to investigate. The Guiones police force is tiny, just a few cops on dirt bikes that are part of the Tourist Police,” Benny explained.
“Tourists have their own cops?” Courtney asked.
“Tourism is a two-billion-dollar business. Costa Rica was the most visited nation in the Central American region, with millions of foreign visitors coming here every year. Especially in these small beach communities that rely on ecotourism but have never had their own police force. So if something happened, the closest National Police Station was up in Nosara, so even if they sent a police car right away, it would take about thirty minutes to get here, even further for some of the other beach communities south of here. So they opened these small Tourist Police substations in the most popular beach towns like Guiones. We’re still too small for our own substation, but at least there is one in Guiones, so a police officer can get down here pretty quickly,” Benny explained.
“The real kick in the pants is that if you want to report a crime or file a complaint against someone, the police can’t do that, only the OIJ, so the victim would have to drive to the nearest OIJ station, which is all the way up in Nicoya, to file a crime report, so obviously, very few crimes get reported, especially small stuff like pickpockets or a car break-in,” Benny said.
“No wonder the crime rate is so low here, when it’s not reported,” Dana said, shaking her head.
“Because Roy was murdered, the case will be fast-tracked, especially him being American, so I’m sure the OIJ has already sent someone down to investigate. But Nicoya is about a two-hour car ride away, and even though they can zoom down faster with their lights flashing, the concept of pulling over for emergency vehicles is still a work in progress here,” Benny said.
“That’s crazy,” Courtney said.
“Welcome to the tropics,” Benny replied.
“Well, I can’t just sit around here waiting for hours. Can you take me to the crime scene?” Dana asked.
“That’s not a good idea, Dana,” Benny warned as Courtney nodded her head in agreement.
But her old investigative journalism spirit had kicked in, and it was stubborn when rekindled, so ten minutes later, Benny was driving Dana and Courtney to the scene of the crime.
“They found his body in the brush off the footpath; about midway between your house and the Tranquil Bay Resort,” Benny said as he drove.
“They weren’t staying there, were they?” Dana asked.
“That’s what I was originally coming to talk to you about. I found out they’ve been in Costa Rica for three months. They’ve been staying at the resort,” Benny said.
“The super swanky one you mentioned the other night? The five-star one that starts at five hundred dollars a night?” Dana asked incredulously.
“That’s the one.”
“How could they possibly afford to stay there for three months?”
“It took a little digging, but I found out where all this money was coming from to pay legal fees, room and board, and more,” Benny said. He stopped talking to maneuver the Land Cruiser around a huge pothole.
The pothole avoided, he continued, “Gustavo Barca is their benefactor; he’s been bankrolling Roy and Skylar one hundred percent.”
“The developer guy from Venezuela?” Dana asked.
“Yes. And he also owns the Tranquil Bay Resort, so it makes sense he would put them up there,” Benny said.
“Why would he do that?” Courtney asked.
“He wants my property,” Dana replied, staring out the window.
“That’s my guess. Gustavo Barca is not known for his charity work, but for being ruthless and one-track minded when he wants something, and he wants his resort to connect to the beach via his own private-access land, so he’s been buying up land like crazy, and there is the Pancha Sabhai Institute, a bed and breakfast, a private farm, and your property in his way.”
“A bunch of yogi monks, a farmer, and little old me. Barca must like his odds,” Dana said, sighing.
Eleven
Dana should have listened to Benny, who had warned her not to go down to the scene of the crime.
“I shouldn’t have gone out there,” she whispered to Benny and Courtney on the quiet drive back to Casa Verde.
Why did I insist? she thought to herself.
Thirty minutes earlier they had pulled up across the entrance to the footpath that led from the town up the mountainside towards the Tranquil Bay Resort. There was yellow crime scene tape hung between two palm trees that blocked access to the footpath.
If that wasn’t enough deterrent, there was a police motocross bike parked diagonally in front of the tape and a bored-looking uniformed police officer leaning up against one of the palm trees, looking at his cell phone.
The police officer was young—in his late twenties. He was wearing the uniform of the Costa Rican Tourist Police: a blue baseball hat with POLICIA, Spanish for POLICE, emblazoned in bright yellow on the cap, a short-sleeved white polo shirt with a blue collar, and a couple of official-looking chest patches embroidered into the shirt. Blue cargo pants were equipped with a utility belt with a set of shiny handcuffs dangling on one side and a holster with the officer’s service pistol on the other side.
Benny peered out the window and said, “That’s Freddy Sanchez.”
“How well do you know him?” Dana asked.
“There are only a few cops in the Playa Guiones substation who oversee all the small beach towns on the coast in the Nosara district, so you get to know most of them after a while. He’s a good cop. Nice and honest,” Be
nny said.
“When you said tourist police, I was expecting a Baywatch lifeguard type,” Courtney said.
“Oh, no, these guys get a lot of flack, even from other cops in the national police force, but they’re actual cops. They’re not lifeguard or tour guides. They go through the same training as any police officer in Costa Rica at the National Police Academy. They face a lot of the same dangers, that is why they’re armed. They’re not all about giving tourists directions. They have added skills—for example, they require all tourist police officers to speak English, and they need to have a very cordial, friendly, and outgoing personality, since they are the face tourists will see when something bad has happened to them,” Benny explained.
Dana and Courtney followed Benny as he approached Officer Sanchez, who looked up from his phone and pocketed it when he saw the trio coming his way.
“Sorry, Don Benny, the footpath will be closed for a couple days. You must go around the mountain.”
“I know, Freddy, this is the cousin of the victim,” Benny said, pointing towards Dana. He introduced them to each other.
Dana could see Officer Sanchez stiffen up. He looked at her and Courtney and offered them a funeral director smile and said in excellent English, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t let anyone through, even family.”
“Is the OIJ on the way?” Benny asked.
Sanchez nodded and said, “Detective Picado is coming.”
Benny sighed. “We should go,” Benny whispered to Dana when they heard a woman scream so loud that it made everyone jump and Officer Sanchez to put his hand on the butt of his gun.
Dana turned and saw Skylar Kirkpatrick coming towards her even more aggressively than she had done so yesterday.
“You murderer!” Skylar yelled as she got closer.
Instinctively, Benny and Courtney stepped in front of Dana in case Skylar would physically attack her.
Officer Sanchez looked at the two groups of people and he got into a defensive stand in the middle. He held his left hand out, his palm facing Skylar, and said in a commanding voice, “Stop right there, ma’am, and please do not come any closer.”
Skylar continued to force Sanchez to stop her by gently putting the palm of his hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am, please stop!” he said, his voice inflicting upwards. He wasn’t yelling, and the last thing he wanted to do was to arrest the widow of the murder victim, but he couldn’t let her assault Dana.
“Ma’am, please stop,” he said again in that commanding voice cops around the globe use.
Skylar finally snapped from her rage trance and she stopped and looked at Sanchez.
“She killed my husband,” Skylar said to the police officer.
“We’ll handle it, right now I need you to please step back and go back to your hotel until we call you,” Sanchez said.
Skylar took two steps back and said, pointing her finger at Dana, “That's her, the woman I told you about. She killed my beloved husband. They’ve been feuding for years and she stole my husband’s property right from under him, but he wasn’t letting her get away with it, and so he was taking her to court. So she killed him so she can keep it all for herself.”
Sanchez glanced over at Benny, still standing between them and Skylar with his hand out.
Dana felt a rush of anger. How dare she? But she bit her lip and said nothing. It made little sense to get into it with Skylar. No matter how she treated Roy and the fact that she was now referring to him as her “beloved husband” was laughable, but she had just lost Roy, so she felt she had to keep quiet and let her vent. Dana wasn’t sure what she would say anyway. She and Skylar didn’t get along, but the acidic tone in Skylar’s voice dumbfounded her, and it shocked her that she would accuse her of killing Roy.
“Well, arrest her, she's killed my husband!” Skylar yelled at Sanchez.
“That is not true,” Benny said calmly to Officer Sanchez.
“Ma’am, like I told you before, the OIJ investigators are on their way. We all need to stay calm and be patient as they have to make their way down from Nicoya, and they’ll want to talk to you so you can provide them with any information you think is important,” Sanchez said calmly to Skylar.
He then turned and looked at Dana and said, “They’ll want to talk to you, too, ma’am, so please go back to your house and wait for the investigators to contact you.”
“Her house?” Skylar seethed. “Didn’t you hear what I just told you? Are you stupid or just incompetent? That is my husband’s house, my house. Not hers!” Skylar shouted as a small crowd of onlookers began to gather around to check out yet another commotion she was involved in. She felt mortified.
“Get me out of here,” Dana whispered to Benny as she felt her knees buckle.
Courtney grabbed Dana by the arm and the three of them walked back to the car as Skylar continued to shout at Dana, calling her a murderer and berating the police officer for not doing anything.
As Benny drove off, Dana could hear Skylar shouting obscenities for what seemed like miles on end.
Twelve
Back at Casa Verde, Dana was a mess. She yo-yoed between grief and anger. It upset her that Skylar accused her of murder in front of her friends, her new community, and especially in front of the police.
“The nerve of that woman,” Courtney said.
As upset as Dana was, she tried to see it from Skylar’s perspective—as hard as that was to do.
“She just lost her husband. Murdered. People say crazy things when overwhelmed with grief. She wants someone to blame right away, and I was an easy target when she saw me there. You guys were right. I should have never gone out there,” Dana said. Wally jumped on her lap, making her feel better. She wondered if he could sense she felt down.
“Sorry for being so crass, but that woman was always saying crazy awful things to you, well before Roy’s death. She used to say awful, crazy things to Roy,” Courtney said.
“Benny, you were like a deflated ball when you heard the detective’s name that was coming to investigate. Picado, I think was his name. You don’t like him?” Dana asked.
“You’re very perceptive,” Benny said, thoroughly impressed.
“Before I sold my soul to public relations, I was an investigative reporter. I’m always reading people, even when I’m trying not to,” Dana said, finally mustering a smile.
“His name is Juan Mora Picado, and no, I don’t like him. I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the beach towns around here that likes Picado. He’s a jerk and a bully,” Benny said.
“Oh, great,” Dana said.
“Sorry,” Benny replied.
“No need to apologize for telling me the truth. I appreciate that.”
“OIJ investigators hate coming to the small beach communities. They feel it’s beneath them to make the trip out here. So when they are here, they can be grumpy about it,” Benny said.
“So what happens when Skylar accuses me of killing Roy to the detective?”
“Well, he’s a jerk, but he is thorough at his job, so regardless of what Skylar says, he’ll look at all of us, including Skylar, since usually murders are committed by someone the victim knows. Especially down here. I can’t remember the last time there was a murder anywhere around here. Sometimes there is drug-related stuff that happens, but not here. Not murder, at least,” Benny said.
Courtney raised her hand in the air and said, “Sorry, crass Courtney here again, but what happens to the whole lawsuit and the contention of the will now that Roy is dead?”
“Well, like in the United States, everything shifts over to the spouse at the time of death, so the suit’s principal could be amended to be Skylar, unless she’s too distraught and wants to drop the whole thing and go back home,” Benny said.
Dana guffawed at the remark and quickly put her hands over her mouth in regret.
But it was too late, all three laughed about it, and for Dana it felt good. She needed to laugh about something on that awful day.
Afte
r a few minutes, they all settled down around the kitchen’s center island. There was some leftover banana daiquiri in the refrigerator. Courtney took out the pitcher and waved it in the air. “I think we need a drink.” Dana agreed.
“It doesn’t look like Skylar will give up fighting me over Casa Verde,” Dana said wistfully.
Benny nodded. “Seems to me she’s doubling down.”
Courtney put down three glasses on the counter and poured in the banana daiquiri.
“She’s the catalyst behind all this legal drama. I know it,” Dana said. She took a sip from her glass, and the ice-cold drink felt refreshing.
“Roy seemed henpecked,” Courtney said.
“I always thought if he and I could just talk, without Skylar around, that we could have come to some amicable agreement. I would have been happy to share Casa Verde with him. But Skylar was adamant. And he was in such a financial bind that he must have agreed to all this to get from down under, financially speaking,” Dana said. “Especially with a rich, powerful man like Gustavo Barca footing the bills.”
“And he’s doing so because Roy agreed to sell him Casa Verde?” Courtney asked.
“He’s sure not doing it out of the kindness of his heart. If he’s footing the bill, he must have a signed contract with Roy and Skylar with this property on the line,” Benny said.
“You don’t think they killed Roy over this property?” Dana asked. That thought had her crumbling down emotionally.
“We know nothing about anything yet. Let's let the investigators do their work,” Benny said.
“Yes, for all we know it was some random thing, a mugging or something like that,” Courtney added.
Dana remained quiet.
“Dana, listen, even if this was about the property, his death has nothing to do with you. They shut people out of their parents' wills all the time. Death and the estates left behind are ripe for tearing even close families apart. Throw in an estranged father and son into the mix and I would have been shocked if this estate would have been executed peacefully without a contentious fight breaking out for the property,” Benny said.
